PNY Technologies today announced the availability of two high-end professional graphics accelerators based on the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 and Quadro FX 4800 GPUs. The two are based on the GT200 architecture. The Quadro FX 5800 features 240 shader units (dubbed CUDA programmable parallel cores) and 4 GB of GDDR3 memory, while the FX 4800 features 192 shader cores with 1.5 GB of GDDR3 memory.

The amount of visual computing power at its disposal allows deployment in computing areas of oil and natural gas exploration, medical imagery, scientific visualisation, and engineering and design.

As described by the company, the new accelerators feature:

Real-time Visualisation of Large Data Sets – Equipped with 1.5 GB and 4GB graphics memory, the Quadro Fx4800 and Quadro FX5800 have the capacity to process large textures and frames in real time while providing fill rates of 38 billion texels per second and geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second.

Ultra-high Colour Fidelity and Resolutions – Dual 10-bit display ports delivering a colour palette of over a billion colours, orders of magnitude greater than previous generations of graphics cards. Also included is a single dual-link digital display connector for ultra-high resolution panels of up to 3840 x 2400 at 24Hz.

The FX5800 is not for gaming or performance. The price is just for the BIOS, which can easily be flashed.

Click to expand...

No. It isnt just the firmware/BIOS. These pro cards usually have different hardware on their output devices, e.g. higher colour quality, different resolution capability (e.g. 3840 x 2400 ), 3D stereo imaging on some, different memory setups like 4GB, etc.

My comments are on THAT. The 4GB memory space. It will make a big different on GPU memory contrained cames, like GTA4. Flashing the firmware/BIOS will do diddly squat to performance, unless you change how you are using the GPU and require more "vector processing" and less "texture processing" and the firmware/BIOS changes the balance of how that is done.

(e.g. ATI FireGL X3 was better than X800 for certain vector based applications, but paid through worse shader-effect performance. The difference was small, but measurable. They optimised for the typical CAD setup, however, it also helped older OpenGL games, like Quake engine based games)

If you force-flash the FX 4800 BIOS onto a GTX 260, you have yourself a $220 brick. The GPU configuration of the G200 as FX4800 differs from that of the same GPU as GTX 260. The FX 4800 has a 384-bit memory bus to access 1.5 GB of memory.